All Of These Stars
by abbyli
Summary: Diagnosed with lymphoma, Damon Salvatore finds himself being forced to join in a cancer support group. There he meets Bonnie Bennett, a young woman who has an outlook on a life of joy even though her own days are numbered. He finds his own life changed forever, and forever after. TFIOS au


**entitled: **All of These Stars (will guide us home)

**summary: **Diagnosed with cancer, Damon Salvatore finds himself being forced to join in a cancer support group. There he meets Bonnie Bennett, a young woman who has an outlook on a life of joy even though her own days are numbered. He finds his own life changed forever, and forever after. TFIOS au

**pairings/characters: **bamon (of course), steroline (supporting), mama salvatore, enzo, lexi branson, matt donovan, sheila bennett, other characters

**rating: **t

**disclaimer: **I do not own The Vampire Diaries or it's characters.

**notes: **I am going to apologize a head of time for this. I rented The Fault in Our Stars the other night and I couldn't make it through it. But of course, this naggy little au plot bunny jumped into my lap and wouldn't go away. So, like I said, if you beautiful people want to go through the painful feels, prepare yourselves. If you do not, I totally understand.

_**dedicated with all of my love to bamon-babies, bonneibennett, halequeenbraeden, sterolineforever, sterolineislove, alovelikethisneverdies, scottiesbutt, damonishome, krayday, crazychicke, and all the rest of the beautiful bamily. **_

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Cancer is a six letter word that spells death.

D-E-A-T-H.

Okay, that's five letters but whatever.

It's simple. You get cancer and you die. Easy, right?

Wrong.

Damon Salvatore is at the ripe old age of twenty three when he is diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's. Or better yet known as, lymphoma.

It all started with a cough. A freaking dry hacking cough that he couldn't get rid of for weeks on end. He kept telling his worrywart mother that he was fine, that it was just the seasonal allergies. His mother, Antonia Salvatore, bought it for a while but then the cough got worse.

That was when she, with the help of his brother, practically hogtied him and dragged him off to the doctor to get examined.

And there, the doctor found a swelled lump in his armpit.

"Damon, have you noticed this before?" the doctor asks, her gloved fingers prodding the raised skin underneath his arm.

He shakes his head. "Nope. Why, is there a problem?"

"Well, it's a hard mass," the doctor says as she gently lowers his arm. "I'd like to do a biopsy and rule out anything too serious."

"Wait a minute, today?" Damon asks, glancing at the back of the doctor's head as she heads for the phone that is resting by the sink. "I just have the flu. Why do I need a biopsy?"

"It's just a precaution," says the doctor. She doesn't say anything else as she picks up the phone and hit's a button. "Can you ask Mrs. Salvatore to come back here, please? Thank you."

"You're calling my mother in here to tell her? You don't trust me to do it?" Damon snaps.

"As a matter of fact, no," the doctor says. "I have been your physician for two years and I know you, Damon Salvatore."

That shuts him up.

A moment later, his mother knocks on the door. The doctor lets her in and quickly explains to her what is going on and what she would like to do. He can see the immediate fear in his mother's eyes but she holds it back, nodding in agreement to his doctor's words before turning to him.

"Mom, this is stupid," he begins but his mother holds up a hand, silencing him.

"Sweetheart, we should get this done today," Antonia says. "Just to get it over with and then we will never have to worry about it again."

He knows his mother is lying right through her teeth but what can he do? So he agrees.

* * *

><p>Without him knowing, the doctor had also ordered a chest x-ray and another series of tests for him to go through.<p>

Lovely.

It's a haze and a blur of movement over the next several hours. Nurses gazing at him sympathetically ("Poor kid...he's not even twenty-five,"). a tech telling him to breathe in and out in front of a blank white board in a very dark room, and two doctors that he doesn't see again strolling in to look at his charts and then leaving.

He already knows what he is about to hear when he is plopped down in front of the desk of some skinny bald doctor with a bad comb over.

"_...Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma...only two tumors in the abdomen...can be treated...caught moderately early...still a chance of survival..." _

So pretty much, he woke up this morning feeling a bit better, and now he was being told that he was going to die.

Oh, god...

_Oh, god..._

* * *

><p>He spends the next day and a half alone.<p>

The doctor that they had seen, Dr. Goldman, had wanted to check him into the hospital almost immediately to begin treatment. But that's when his mother had stepped in, asking if delaying treatment for a day was going to be a huge problem.

Luckily, the doctor had understood and given in.

Feeling a bit okay, physically that is, Damon steals the keys for his Camaro and drives. He drives and drives and drives until he almost runs out of gas.

Maybe fleeing can help. Maybe running away can make this horrible thing go away.

Or not.

And sitting there, on the side of the road in the middle of no where, it hits.

He has two tumors in his chest, possibly more.

He has cancer.

Damon is grateful then that he drove out in the middle of nowhere because he screams. He screams until he begins to cough. And then he coughs so much that he can barely catch his breath.

That's it. This is it. The end.

* * *

><p>He begins his treatment the following morning.<p>

It's painful. More painful than anything he has experienced in his life.

Greater than the time in high school when he broke five ribs playing football. That sucked a big one. The doctors had kept him in the hospital for three days, afraid that one of his ribs have punctured a lung, due to his short breathing. He remembers his mother flitting around, her touch feather light and so gentle, keeping him grounded. Reminding him to hang on. That the pain would soon end.

This pain was different. Different because he knew that it was going to lead to a different pain that would probably never diminish.

Because that was cancer.

Dr. Goldman lets him leave around three that afternoon, after being in that tiny claustrophobic room for nearly nine hours. He barely listens as the doctor schedules him for another round of chemotherapy and promises to see him soon.

Damon struggles to focus as his mother leads him out to the car, her arms wrapped around his waist and her chin just resting on his shoulder. His vision blurs and he is suddenly overcome by a wave of nausea.

"Mom..." he manages. "Mom, I gotta -"

"It's okay, sweetie," Antonia whispers. "Let it out."

As soon as the words leave her mouth, he leans over and vomits right there in the parking lot. People are passing by, not knowing and not caring that he has just gone through a horrible round of chemotherapy.

His mother's arms are soft and gentle as she helps him the rest of the way to her van. The same minivan that she has had for the last ten years. She had bought it brand new right around his thirteenth birthday just when he joined modified baseball. It was perfect because it fit eight squirming little baseball players or one brand new moody teenage boy and his six year old brother who seemed to carry around every toy that he owned in that van.

A van where he felt safe because he was there with his mom and little brother.

Damon Salvatore is twenty three years old, five months away from his twenty-fourth birthday. His mother is Antonia Salvatore, his brother is the incredibly geeky Stefan Salvatore. He is in his second year of college and his life is normal.

Or at least, used to be.

Hitting a button on the fob on her keys, the van door slides open. His mother's arms are soft and strong as she shifts his body into the back seat. There are blankets and pillows spread about that she helps him settle into. Almost the exact second his head hits those pillows, he sinks into a drugged oblivion.

* * *

><p>And that's how it goes for the next six weeks. Continuous rounds of chemotherapy, twice a week.<p>

He spends his nights, that he normally would have spent either playing video games, working, or doing school work, vomiting and laying curled in an absolute agony that just doesn't seem real.

His mother, his poor mother who should have been free, begins sleeping on his couch. She is there through those horrible first weeks, doing whatever she can to ease his pain. His brother is there almost as much as she is, bringing him food that he can't keep down and doing constant runs to the pharmacy for medications and whatever the hell else those stupid doctors have put him on.

A miserable experience.

But after another long two weeks, he slowly begins to feel better. His body, which is as shaky as a newborn giraffe taking it's first tottery steps, starts to adjust. A new kind of strength takes to his body and that's that.

Maybe.

The cancer is far from being over, the doctor says. The tumors are still the same, no better, no worse. But regaining strength and actually getting control of his body again, that's good news.

So he tries to return to his old life.

That doesn't work out so well.

How can it? The news had already spread that he was sick. No one would look at him the same way again. He wasn't Damon Salvatore anymore, he was Damon Salvatore. The guy who was dying.

* * *

><p>"You're not dead yet, Damon."<p>

His brother's voice is nearly inaudible and easy to miss. He doesn't miss it.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Damon asks softly as he blows up a zombie on his controller.

"Perhaps..." Stefan says carefully. "Perhaps you should get some help."

"Like a shrink?" Damon replies, not taking his eyes off the screen. "Do you think I'm crazy, little brother?"

Stefan pulls himself forward on the couch and hit's a button on the console of the controller, sending the screen to black. Damon opens his mouth to protest but Stefan holds up a hand, silencing him.

"Mom talked to your doctor and together, they found a cancer support group. You would meet with about a dozen other people and a counselor, twice a month, and just talk," Stefan says, his eyes gentle. "Come on, Damon. Things are not the same and you can never make them the same again."

Damon puts down his controller, turning to face his younger brother. "You can say that," he says slowly, ice dripping off each word. "But how do you know? You are not the one with cancer, Stef."

That's when his brother gets to his feet so quickly it's like his feet have wings. Stefan steps over to a small table by the window and opens the drawer, pulling out two pamphlets and lightly tossing them in his direction.

"No, I am not the one with cancer. You are," Stefan says as he heads for the kitchen. "But I am watching you and hating to see you in this kind of pain."

Damon watches him disappear through the swinging doors, ignoring the sudden lump that has risen in his throat. He turns, leaning down to pick up the pamphlets that have fallen to the floor. As he rises up too quickly, he heaves a hacking cough. Another follows and he stretches back, his throat exposed and mouth open.

A gentle hand rests on his shoulder, fingers digging in slightly. "Easy, brother. Take a deep breath."

Damon coughs again, sitting up.

"Tell me about this support group."

* * *

><p>In the freaking hospital of all places. Seriously? That's where this group meets?<p>

Feeling stronger, Damon drives his Camaro to the hospital. He parks in the visitors lane and walks inside, shrugging off his leather jacket almost instantly when his skin greets the humid stale air of the building. Minutes later, he puts it back on.

He sees a small group gathering in the main waiting room. A few are bald and kind of bloated, many of them look young. Younger than him. And that's the scary part.

A woman that looks to be in her forties spots him, waving a hand. "Hi, are you Damon Salvatore?"

"Uh, yeah?"

"Hi Damon, I'm Jackie Benson. I am the group counselor," the woman says. She holds up a hand that he is tempted to ignore but he shakes it anyway. "You are our last member so why don't we head outside?"

Damon steps back, watching as the rest of the group passes by him and heads for the revolving electric doors, following this woman. He stands there, staring in amazement, and is almost left behind until a small young woman, who is the last person out the door, stops and turns towards where he is standing.

"Are you coming?" the girl says with a smile.

"Oh! Yeah."

The girl grins, stepping through the revolving door and waiting as he steps through too. He spies the rest of the group already almost a block ahead, walking together down the sidewalk.

"Where the hell are we going?"

"It's something that Jackie does," the girl explains. "As long as everyone is feeling okay, we get out of the hospital. What's the point of having meetings there when we already spend so much time there already?"

Damon curls a lip, cocking his head to the side. "That's actually good logic."

The girl laughs too, gently patting his elbow before she speeds up to a jog to catch up with the others. He watches as she falls into step with another woman with long blond hair.

Damon follows a few paces behind, his eyes tracing the forms of a few other people. It doesn't make sense to him because these people don't look sick. They actually look pretty damn healthy.

After another block, they cross traffic and step into a small park. People begin to plop themselves down into the grass in a large circle. Damon remains standing.

"Damon? Are you all right?" Jackie asks when she sees.

"Uh, yeah," he mumbles, heat crossing his cheeks before he lowers himself down beside a boy wearing dark glasses. The girl that had spoken to him earlier sits almost directly across in the circle. She casts him a smile and an encouraging nod but he looks away.

He just can't.

For the next ten minutes, he barely listens as others tell their stories. The girl with the blond hair (Caroline, he thinks) is actually not afflicted with cancer but had lost her father three months before. Her father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and then was gone a month later.

The boy next to him had a cancer of the eye, something called Medulloepithelioma that he had been diagnosed with when he was seven. The girl on the other side suffered from melanoma that had gone untreated for almost three years and had spread to her liver.

"Bonnie?"

Damon is pulled out of his thoughts when the girl across the circle, the girl that had smiled at him, the girl that had actually given him a second glance ever since the news of his diagnosis had come out, she shifts her small frame so she is on her knees.

Long dark hair falls around her face, some of it still in the messy braid that she must have lazily thrown it into this morning. Her eyes, her eyes are not the eyes of a person who is sick. Her eyes are alive.

"Well, I am only here because Caroline needed some support on her first day," this girl says.

"You do have a story to tell," says Jackie.

"Yeah, I guess I do," she says. Her green eyes scan around, coming to rest on him once again. "Hi, everyone. My name is Bonnie Bennett. I am nineteen years old and I have what you would call a convexity meningioma. It's a brain tumor that grows at the front of my brain."

Damon's heart begins to drop right into his stomach.

"The tumor has already grown so large that it is inoperable. It would just be too dangerous for them to even try and remove it and even if they did, my mental status would be reduced. So I am undergoing radiation in an attempt to reduce the size and we'll see how that goes," Bonnie finishes, sliding her fingers together.

Silence is deafening, even in a crowded and noisy park like this.

Jackie swallows, managing a smile before she turns to her right. "Thank you Bonnie."

And that's it.

Damon catches Bonnie's eye, holding her gaze this time. And he just can't look away.

* * *

><p><strong>The after part I tried to fit in here at the end wasn't working so it will be in the next chapter. <strong>

**I will say, this is actually going to be the only time that was we see Bonnie and Damon in group. In the film, we only saw Gus and Hazel in group in the beginning and the rest was their amazing love story. **

**I only hope I can do that kind of love story justice. **

**Review? **


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